Our Founder on Facebook Data Mining

The more data we collect, the more important Facebook Data Mining - the process of finding patterns in large data sets - becomes. Understanding large amounts of data plays a crucial role for advertising on Facebook, as well. That’s why our founder, Alex, gave a talk at the first Facebook Ads Camp in Cologne, Germany.

Importance of networks for brands

The graph below starts on the day quintly was born. The first Facebook page was tracked and over time Facebook grew, and simultaneously more clients tracked more profiles in our database. Thus, the number of tracked profiles grew massively over time. We added Twitter as the second network to our tool and the number of profiles analyzed here rose as well. Since then YouTube, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pinterest and Instagram have been added. Instagram especially grew into one of the most important networks and has almost caught up with Twitter.

Having a look at the total breakdown of profiles analyzed, we can identify that Facebook is by far the most tracked network and far from being dead, despite what some sources claim. 66.6% of all profiles tracked in our database are Facebook pages, followed by Twitter and Instagram. YouTube comes in fourth followed by the less tracked networks. Instagram, already a couple of years old as well, still has by far the highest growth in terms of followers and has a higher importance for many brands in quite a few industries already. Advertising on Instagram is still in the very early stage of development and as soon as an increasingly large number of brands develop well-working strategies, its importance in marketing will make another big leap forward.

Even more promising for the future of the photo and video platform is that interaction rates remain highest.

How much do brands sponsor their content?

In order to get an understanding of how many brands rely on sponsoring content as part of their social media strategy, Alex drew relevant data with the help of our Sponsored Post Detection metric. This machine learning approach enables us to see - with a very high accuracy - which posts have been sponsored and which received interactions through organic means. Analyzing the short period of April 15th - 30th, we found that 13% of all posts had been supported with money.

Thinking of the massive amount of posts per day of our data set, you can get a sense of how much money brands invest in Facebook advertising. Note: This number does not even take dark posts into account.

To go one step deeper into the analysis, Alex shared the split per country of the audience.

It is interesting to see that Brazil, Italy and the U.K. are at the top of the list and the US in the middle of the chart, whereas Germany has a lower share of sponsored posts than businesses in Philippines and Mexico. Switzerland at the end of the chart is the country with the lowest share of sponsored posts.

After Alex gave insights into Facebook’s Data Mining, we heard interesting talks about how companies such as Sixt, Adespresso and Trusted Shops use Facebook Ads successfully. Among that Lars Ofterdinger from the Koblenz, Germany based agency 247 Grad shared a fascinating use case on Facebook Ads for local businesses. To the organizers of the first Facebook Ads conference: It was a great conference, thanks for the chance to talk about Data Mining and see you again next year!

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